Sourdough started

The posts about my sourdough starter petered out a few days ago. Don't worry; I didn't kill it. It's been bubbling away happily as I've fed it every day over the course of the past week. Today I finally got round to using it for bread. Time to continue making my kitchen look like it's been hit by a flour bomb.

Sourdough.com gave me all the details for getting my sourdough starter off to a really strong start but there was no specific "beginners" recipe, so I decided to coble together a recipe using some of the other instructions that I'd found while researching sourdough on the internet. Here's how it went.

I started with 150g of my starter (it had been fed the night before and left at room temperature over night) and added 350g strong white bread flour,150g rye flour and 340g tepid water. I mixed this all together in a large mixing bowl, covered it with a damp tea towel and set it aside for 20 minutes. I then added 1 teaspoon salt and kneaded the dough in the bowl for 15 seconds. I set it aside for another 15 minutes, then did 15 seconds of kneading again... another 15 minutes resting, another 15 seconds kneading. And then it was time for the prove. It needed to double in size but, as with my fougasse, the house was too chilly for optimum yeasty activity and this took about 3 hours. Still, it happened eventually.

I then scraped the dough carefully out onto a very well floured surface (this is a sticky dough and I’d learnt my lesson with the fougasse). And now it was time to pretend I was making pastry. I gently pulled the dough about into a large rectangle; I folded one third onto the middle third of the bread, and then folded the other third on top of this. I turned the dough by 90 degrees and repeated the process. Time for more resting, this time 20 minutes. The folding and resting was repeated twice.

After the last fold, I started preheating my oven as hot as it would go, around 250 degrees C, with the baking tray in that I intended to cook the bread on. The bread rested for another 20 minutes but this time on a piece of baking parchment and shaped (... poorly) into a rough loaf. Oven and tray preheated, I brushed the loaf with water (use a spray if you have one... I don’t), quickly placed it in the oven on the baking tray and then covered with a roasting dish. I then cursed myself for forgetting to slash the top of the loaf, but resolved that it would just have to be an ugly loaf. It baked like this for 15 minutes before the roasting dish was removed and the temperature was turned down to 200 degrees C. I baked it for another 20 minutes until golden and hollow-sounding.

It went onto a cooling wrack and I waited for it to cool down with baited breath... I’m not too patient and I was keen to hack it open and see what it looked like inside. I managed to hold back the urge until it had cooled down a bit and grabbed a bread knife... but the crust fought back a little too much, so my ridiculously-sharp college bread knife got broken out to finish the job. Time for the reveal; was it light and airy inside or did I have a brick of flour?

Success! My loaf may have been a bit ugly on the outside but the inside was definitely beautiful, a patchwork of big and small bubbles. It was also moist and crumpty. The crust had an appealing crackle to it when I tore into a slice and the bread as a whole had the developed, tangy flavour that you only get from a long fermentation process. The rye flour also added an extra bit of interesting colour and flavour.

I’d never tasted sourdough before making it this time for myself, but I can see why there are many people wanting this traditional method of bread making to revived. The results are flavourful, the textures are appealing, the overall process shows the development of skills and knowledge over the course of centuries and this has definitely been a key lesson in my own baking education. 


Recipe adapted from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/apr/14/make-your-own-sourdough